There was another far-ranging conversation in a session today, but something came up that I don't think I have written about directly before, but have referenced here and there over the years. We were talking about the differences in behaviours of children today and ourselves when we were young, as well as the difference in teachers, and parents. But the thing that came up was about friendships.
Most of our lives are now heavily curated, where we are constantly choosing what we are going to consume, or have it chosen for us based on our past choices. There isn't much random. However, I also think that due to this, there might be more compartmentalisation of social activity over time. When I was a younger, friends had all kinds of different hobbies, activities and interests, yet we were friends regardless. Nowadays, it seems that people tend to have topic-based friendships based on a period of their life or some interest, and I wonder what kind of effect this has on our wellbeing.
If we were to go back in history a little, we would find that families were larger, people moved less and not as far away and a community was filled with people who knew each other across generations. But the more closed behind screens we have become, the weaker our community connections, the less people know us, and the narrower our mix of interactions.
Yet, we are social animals that have evolved from what was until relatively recently, in the company of small tribes of a few hundred people at most. And, those few hundred people would be together "for life", however long that life might have been. This is not the case today though, and instead we have people searching for identity in other people's eyes. This is what drives social media creators today.
The approval of strangers.
But it is also interesting to think that when I was a kid, my parents had no interest in being my friend. They were my parents. My dad played something occasionally, my mother did not, but that was just the way life was. And teachers, well, there was a whole range of them, from the lovely ones dedicated to their work, to the terrible ones who liked to punish and of course, the weirdly always very strange technical teachers, who always seems to have some kind of personality disorder. Kids had to interact with many different kinds of people.
Now though, that is not the case, as parents seem more interested in being their kids friends than parenting, and teachers have had their authority limited to the point that they all have to be much the same. The pool of interpersonal interaction has been curated. And even when problems arise, like arguments or bullying, it is no longer up to the children to sort it out amongst themselves, they are taught to go and get an adult.
A lot of younger workers these days have an expectation that their workplace is also their social place, meaning that they expect to have friends at work and they can get quite socially clingy. However, at the same time, they have little commitment to the workplace itself and will move every year for a pay rise, walking into the new job expecting it to replace the social circle from the last. This obviously creates a rotating door of people coming in and out of their lives, but there is very little consistency.
No one knows me.
And I wonder what happens to our wellbeing and how we feel about our experience when we get older and we don't really have anyone around. Smaller families mean less siblings, disconnected social lives mean less friends, people are staying out of long-term relationships and having less children themselves, and we are constantly reducing our social footprint as we hide behind screens and between headphones. We don't have "our tribe" through life today, and we feel very little responsibility to the communities in which we live.
Are we stronger as individuals because of it?
I don't think so. But I am sure there are many people who would think otherwise, because people are messy, and it is far more convenient to sit behind the screen consuming the endless stream of curated content, rather than deal with the problems of others. Because that is what having real friends means - being there for the bad times, as well as the good.
Good times never last.
No matter what we do in life or how good (or bad) we have it, nothing lasts forever, including good times. This means that if we are only going to be friends with people during the good times, we are going to constantly have to make more friends every time our current ones get into some trouble and we leave, or we get into trouble, and they leave. But making friends is time-consuming and takes energy and effort, which is why so few people are spending time actually making friends these days. It is more convenient to just avoid people altogether.
But we have our nature.
We try to bury "who we are" under a thousand labels, but at the core, we are still those social, tribal, face-to-face people that we have evolved into over the space of the last two million years, and especially the last few hundred thousand years. Our wiring is made to develop not only social connection, but long-term social connection where we invest ourselves into others, and they into us in a relationship of reciprocity.
We can keep ignoring ourselves.
But I don't think it is working out well.
Taraz
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